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"It is not simply a good book about history. It is one of those books which makes history. ... "
-- Vladimir Bukovsky, co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement and author of Judgment in Moscow, and Pavel Stroilov, author of Behind the Desert Storm.
"Diana West is distinguished from almost all political commentators because she seeks less to defend ideas and proposals than to investigate and understand what happens and what has happened. This gives her modest and unpretentious books and articles the status of true scientific inquiry, shifting the debate from the field of liking and disliking to being and non-being."
-- Olavo de Carvalho
If you're looking for something to read, this is the most dazzling, mind-warping book I have read in a long time. It has been criticized by the folks at Front Page, but they don't quite get what Ms. West has set out to do and accomplished. I have a whole library of books on communism, but -- "Witness" excepted -- this may be the best.
-- Jack Cashill, author of Deconstructing Obama: The Lives, Loves and Letters of America's First Postmodern President and First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America
"Every once in a while, something happens that turns a whole structure of preconceived ideas upside down, shattering tales and narratives long taken for granted, destroying prejudice, clearing space for new understanding to grow. Diana West's latest book, American Betrayal, is such an event."
-- Henrik Raeder Clausen, Europe News
West's lesson to Americans: Reality can't be redacted, buried, fabricated, falsified, or omitted. Her book is eloquent proof of it.
-- Edward Cline, Family Security Matters
"I have read it, and agree wholeheartedly."
-- Angelo Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston Unversity, and fellow of the Claremont Institute.
Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six.
-- John Dietrich, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.
After reading American Betrayal and much of the vituperation generated by neoconservative "consensus" historians, I conclude that we cannot ignore what West has demonstrated through evidence and cogent argument.
-- John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
"A brilliantly researched and argued book."
-- Edward Jay Epstein, author of Deception: The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA, The Annals 0f Unsolved Crime
"This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic."
-- M. Stanton Evans, author of Stalin's Secret Agents and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies
Her task is ambitious; her sweep of crucial but too-little-known facts of history is impressive; and her arguments are eloquent and witty. ... American Betrayal is one of those books that will change the way many of us see the world.
-- Susan Freis Falknor, Blue Ridge Forum
"American Betrayal is absolutely required reading. Essential. You're sleepwalking without it."
-- Chris Farrell, director of investigations research, Judicial Watch
"Diana West wrote a brilliant book called American Betrayal, which I recommend to everybody ... It is a seminal work that will grow in importance."
-- Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker
"This is a must read for any serious student of history and anyone working to understand the Marxist counter-state in America."
-- John Guandolo, president, Understanding the Threat, former FBI special agent
It is myth, or a series of myths, concerning WW2 that Diana West is aiming to replace with history in 2013’s American Betrayal.
If West’s startling revisionism is anywhere near the historical truth, the book is what Nietzsche wished his writings to be, dynamite.
-- Mark Gullick, British Intelligence
“What Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.”
-- Lars Hedegaard, historian, journalist, founder, Danish Free Press Society
The polemics against your Betrayal have a familiar smell: The masters of the guild get angry when someone less worthy than they are ventures into the orchard in which only they are privileged to harvest. The harvest the outsider brought in, they ritually burn.
-- Hans Jansen, former professor of Islamic Thought, University of Utrecht
No book has ever frightened me as much as American Betrayal. ... [West] patiently builds a story outlining a network of subversion so bizarrely immense that to write it down will seem too fantastic to anyone without the book’s detailed breadth and depth. It all adds up to a story so disturbing that it has changed my attitude to almost everything I think about how the world actually is. ... By the time you put the book down, you have a very different view of America’s war aims and strategies. The core question is, did the USA follow a strategy that served its own best interests, or Stalin’s? And it’s not that it was Stalin’s that is so compelling, since you knew that had to be the answer, but the evidence in detail that West provides that makes this a book you cannot ignore.
-- Steven Kates, RMIT (Australia) Associate Professor of Economics, Quadrant
"Diana West's new book rewrites WWII and Cold War history not by disclosing secrets, but by illuminating facts that have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Furthermore, she integrates intelligence and political history in ways never done before."
-- Jeffrey Norwitz, former professor of counterterrorism, Naval War College
[American Betrayal is] the most important anti-Communist book of our time ... a book that can open people's eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise ... full of insights, factual corroboration, and psychological nuance.
-- J.R. Nyquist, author, Origins of the Fourth World War
Although I know [Christopher] Andrew well, and have met [Oleg] Gordievsky twice, I now doubt their characterization of Hopkins -- also embraced by Radosh and the scholarly community. I now support West's conclusions after rereading KGB: The Inside Story account 23 years later [relevant passages cited in American Betrayal]. It does not ring true that Hopkins was an innocent dupe dedicated solely to defeating the Nazis. Hopkins comes over in history as crafty, secretive and no one's fool, hardly the personality traits of a naïve fellow traveler. And his fingerprints are on the large majority of pro-Soviet policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration. West deserves respect for cutting through the dross that obscures the evidence about Hopkins, and for screaming from the rooftops that the U.S. was the victim of a successful Soviet intelligence operation.
-- Bernie Reeves, founder of The Raleigh Spy Conference, American Thinker
Diana West’s American Betrayal — a remarkable, novel-like work of sorely needed historical re-analysis — is punctuated by the Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. ... But West, although passionate and direct, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing, multi-temporal narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.
-- Andrew G. Bostom, PJ Media
Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around this book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized as a disinformation campaign.
-- Jed Babbin, The American Spectator
In American Betrayal, Ms. West's well-established reputation for attacking "sacred cows" remains intact. The resulting beneficiaries are the readers, especially those who can deal with the truth.
-- Wes Vernon, Renew America
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Mar
2
Written by:
Diana West
Saturday, March 02, 2013 8:24 AM
The Atlantic Wire notes the appearance of the above image in Inspire magazine, which may be described as Al Qaeda's English-language jihad glossy, a naseous-making and surreal propaganda product of global jihad.
Not surprisingly, the AQ magazine's Hollywood-style artwork is nauseous-making and surreal, too. Here we see Al Qaeda, adopting the cartoonish lexicon of George Bush, the Old West (Wanted, Dead or Alive), the Obama administration and Communist/labor/Left organizing ("Yes We Can") to remind its followers and, probably more important, the rest of us that it is targeting a list of law-abiding, peaceable people whose *crime* in the eyes of Islam is *blasphemy.*
Below is an analysis of the AtlanticWire's Daschiell Bennett's account, which I can assume took me longer to write than the hasty-seeming account. (As did, no doubt, this lengthy post on the New York Times' hatchet job on Lars Hedegaard.) I find the attitudes Bennett conveys so casually, however, of particular interest.
(Hat tip Andrew Bostom; links in the AtlanticWire original.)
Daschiell Bennett
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The lede:
Al Qaeda has published the latest issue of its jihadist recruitment magazine Inspire, which includes a handy, up-to-date list of all the people they hate the most.
I know "irony" is the preferred, smart approach, particularly to difficult subjects, but it's time to consider that the relentlessly oblique treatment is evidence of the moral exhaustion that characterizes the mainstream response to expansionist Islam.
Published under the heading, "Wanted: Dead Or Alive for Crimes Against Islam," the magazine includes the nine men and two people they've targeted as their biggest enemies.
(He means "two women" -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Molly Norris. I don't get the "people" thing -- some new convention?)
In case you're not clear on what they want, exactly, the list also includes an image of one of the wanted, Koran-hating pastor Terry Jones, being shot in the head. Beneath that is the caption, "Yes We Can: A Bullet A Day Keeps the Infidel Away."
Not subtle.
More punchline than comment, this catchphrase of "irony" ("not subtle") preserves a certain distance from the import and implications of the foul image of assassination Daschiell Bennett describes -- incidentally, a far cry from the vivid writing of his eponymous namesake. At the same time, however, Bennett uses only the crudest language to identify Jones: the "wanted, Koran-hating pastor." Not only does he choose to allow "wanted" to pass without scare quotes -- this isn't an FBI bulletin, after all, but a disgusting jihad terror tactic -- he even conveys the Islamic essence of Jones' supposed crime. One wonders if he would have described a lightning-rod-opponent of similar religious and imperial supremacism as a "Mein-Kampf-hater"?
Bennett continues:
More than half the names on the list (a couple of which are misspelled) are related to various cartoon controversies that date back to 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.
Here we go again -- the dhimmi style-book convention on "the Prophet Mohammed" which, of course, does not apply to "the Prophet Moses" or "the Savior Jesus Christ."
It also includes two famous Dutch politicians who have been openly critical of Islam, the man who spread the notorious "Innocence of Islam" video, Jones, and of course, Salman Rushdie.
Note: Bennett's "man who spread" link sources The American Muslim website, whose editor Sheila Musaji's work frequently appears on the Muslim Brotherhood English-language website. But more important, what does he mean by writing that the man "spread" something "notorious" about Islam? The Koranic echoes are unmistakable, whether Bennett knows it, summoning lines from the Islamic book about spreading corruption through the land, spreading mischief, etc. -- Islamic crimes of blasphemy and the like. In the modern idiom, such Islamic crimes now extend to posting a video clip on Youtube, something Bennett, likely unconsciously, has in some way validated
If you're noticing a common theme, it's that these are not people who have killed Muslims or even waged war on al Qaeda directly. No, the greatest crime imaginable is insulting the Prophet Mohammed, which most—if not all—of these people would gladly admit to being guilty of. Presidents Obama and Bush will have to wait their turn.
Here's the full list, with background.
I don't want to read more than this slim text will bear, but it is bears noting Bennett's failure to modify "the greatest crime imagineable" with an "Islamic" disclaimer of sorts. Maybe his discretion came out of a moment's hesitation over the use of "Islamic" vs. "Islamist" to describe the "crime." Since the prohibition against "insulting" Mohammed is universally Islamic, maybe he decided to leave it blank. Mustn't offend .... What is left, however, is a reading of the "greatest crime imaginable" as a declarative matter of consensus -- as if it is the greatest crime imaginable.
I note this by way of preface to Bennett's "background" descriptions which, quite shockingly, tend to underscore the specifically Islamic nature of the grievances against these varied standard-bearers of free speech.
Geert Wilders: Founder of the Dutch "Party for Freedom"; has been quoted as saying "I don't hate Muslims, I hate Islam."
He's a hater.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Somali-born Dutch activist and politician; has written that "We are at war with Islam," not just "radical Islam" and it must be defeated; married to British historian Niall Ferguson (though that's probably not related).
She's a war-monger.
Morris Sadek: Egyptian-American Coptic Christian; he spread the anti-Islam video "Innocence of Muslims" that sparked violent protests in several Muslim countries.
He spread corruption through the land.
Carsten Juste & Flemming Rose: Editor-in-chief and cultural editors at Jyllands-Posten when the paper chose to publish cartoons mocking Mohammed.
Serves them right for breaking Islamic law.
Kurt Westergaard: Cartoonist who contributed to the Jyllands-Posten controversy; his turban-as-bomb drawing became the most famous of the cartoons.
Say no more.
Lars Vilks: Dutch [sic] cartoonist who published his own Mohammed drawings more than a year after the Jyllands-Posten incident.
Couldn't he see what would happen if he broke Islamic law, too?
Molly Norris: American cartoonist who proposed "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" as a protest against both censorship and the idea that images of Mohtammed should be forbidden.
Norris, identifiably Lefty, gets the most sympathetic description, which, of course, would serve to describe the basic aims of the rest of list.
Stephane Charbonnier: Editor of Charlie Hedbo, a French satirical magazine that has published several mocking images of Mohammed on its cover (and got its office firebombed as a result.)
Cause -- publishing mocking images of Mo -- and effect -- firebombed office. No Islamic law, Islamic volition in between.
Terry Jones: Florida preacher who has burned Korans in protest of Islam.
Say no more.
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, etc.
Etc.
Without comment, without context, and in the end, even without irony, the AtlanticWire has just passed along Islam's rationale for the AQ most wanted list.
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